Sea Lord

Part Two

“The bastards.” Charlie had taken a lantern from the boot of his car and, in its bright light, was staring down at the stranded Sunflower. His voice was full of disgust and shock; almost, it seemed to my confused mind, full of a personal revulsion at what Garrard had done to my boat. “Oh, God, the bastards,” he said again, then, with all his old resilience, he plucked optimism out of disaster. “But don’t worry, Johnny. We’ll mend the boat! I’ll have some lads and a crane here at sparrow’s fart. We’ll lift her out, bung her on a low-loader, and take her to my place. We’ll make her good as new, eh?”

I was too weak to respond. I was still shivering, too feeble to help as Charlie swung down into the dock and fixed a line to Sunflower’s transom post. “At least we know she’s not going anywhere,” he shouted up to me; then, as he climbed nimbly back to the quay’s top, “cheer up, boy, she’ll mend. I’ve seen worse.”

Charlie hadn’t changed, except that he was more prosperous. He still had the quick smile, the same unruly hair and the same competent manner. He was a big man; hugely capable and scornfully dismissive of all difficulties. “It’s not the end of the world, Johnny,” he told me, “so get in the motor and we’ll go home.”

His car was a Jaguar; brand new with deep leather seats and a dashboard like a fighter plane’s. I protested that I shouldn’t sit on the seats in my soaking wet jeans that Charlie had fished out of the dock, but he didn’t care. “Seats can be cleaned, you fool. Just get in.”

He told me he had telephoned home the night before. “I’ve been out of touch, you see, but once Yvonne said you were here, I came like a shot.”

“I’m bloody lucky you did.” I was shivering, still in shock, still ashamed of being so humiliated by Garrard and Peel.

“We were always lucky, you and I.” Charlie grinned at me, then used his earphone to wake up his foreman. He said he wanted a crane and a low-loader at Cullen’s Yard at dawn. The foreman evidently did not mind being woken at the dead of night, or else was used to it.

Charlie lit each of us a cigarette. My pipe was somewhere in the bottom of George Cullen’s dock, along with my passport, money, everything. Damn George for betraying me, I thought.

“I suppose,” Charlie said, “that you don’t want to call the police?” He offered me the earphone anyway, but I shook my head. It wasn’t that I had anything to hide, but after my experiences with the police four years before I didn’t want anything more to do with them. I just wanted to sail away, nothing more. “Then let’s get the hell out of here.” Charlie slammed his door and started the motor. “So what were those bastards doing to you?”

“They were going to kill me.” I began shivering again, so I drank more of his whisky and sucked on the cigarette as we bounced out of George’s yard and accelerated away. There was no sign of either Garrard or Peel, nor of their dark van.

“Tell me, then,” Charlie ordered.

I told him all that had happened. He grunted an ominous curse when I said that it must have been George Cullen who had betrayed me, but he said nothing else till I told him that the murder attempt was somehow connected with the theft of the Van Gogh. “That bloody picture!” he said with disgust.

“It’s a good painting,” I said defensively.

“Piss off, Johnny. It’s a bloody daub, isn’t it?” Charlie still had a Devon accent as broad as Dartmoor. “I’ve seen better flower pictures on birthday cards.”

“But those aren’t valued at a handful of millions. Twenty million, to be precise.”

That checked him. “Jesus Christ. Are you serious?”

“Twenty million. That’s what I’ve been offered.”

“Who by?”

“Buzzacott.”

He gave a low whistle. I understood his incredulity. Charlie could understand a piece of land being worth twenty million, for land could be turned into a profit, but a painting? He drove in silence for a few minutes, then offered a scornful laugh. “It’s a load of codswallop, Johnny. What was your mother offered? Four? Five?”

“Four.”

“So it’s gone up five hundred per cent in four years? Bloody hell, I should be in that business. I’ll sell the trucks tomorrow and buy myself a paint box. I tell you, Johnny, there’s more money than bloody sense in this world. No painting can be worth twenty million.”

“Maybe, but those bastards just tried to kill me for it.”

“Do they think you’ve got it?” he asked incredulously.

“No, but they seem frightened that I might get hold of it and sell it.” I paused, thinking that nothing made sense. “They said that my sin was inheriting the painting.”

“Bastards.” He offered the dismissive judgment, then lit himself another cigarette. He had always smoked too much, but all Charlie’s appetites were excessive. One day, I supposed, that over-indulgence would catch up with him, but now, in the dashboard’s dim light, he looked incredibly fit and well.

He drove like a man bent on suicide, but he had always been touched by outrageous good luck, so I doubted he’d ever kill himself at the wheel. He turned on the car heater to warm me up, then told me about his company. “I mainly sub-contract plant for road construction, but I’ll do anything with a profit. I’ve got a couple of caravan sites in Cornwall, and I tarted up those three scabby cottages at the bottom of the village and sold them for a wicked sum to folks from London. Of course I’m up to my eyeballs in debt, but who isn’t these days?”

“I’m not.”

“You always were an idiot,” he said fondly. “There’s no point in risking your own money when the banks want to lend it. I borrowed a clean million eighteen months after you left, and I’m still borrowing. Mind you, my profits are bigger than the bank’s interest payments, so what the hell?” We had turned into the Devon lanes now, and the Jaguar was travelling between their narrow hedgerows like a bullet down a rifle barrel. Once or twice a rabbit froze in the harsh light, but Charlie just drove over them. He was country-bred and had no sentimentality about animals.

“Do you still have the dogs?” I asked him.

“Of course.” Charlie had loved hunting with his terriers. That was how I’d first met Charlie; he had been eight years old, I was seven, and I had found him poaching my father’s land. He had been teaching me tricks ever since.

There was a thump as another rabbit died. I winced. Charlie frowned, but not because of the rabbit. “I saw that your mother died.”

“Cursing me.”

He laughed. “She was a rancid bitch, eh?”

“She never liked you.”

“That was mutual. How’s Georgina?”

“Same as ever.”

“Poor maid,” he tutted. Charlie had always been kind to Georgina, though that kindness had never extended to my other sister. He used to call Elizabeth ‘Lady Muck’, and I noticed he did not bother to ask after her now. Instead, after a moment’s silence, he laughed ruefully. “Funny when you think about it.”

“What is?”

“I don’t know.” He was silent for a moment. The headlights were brilliant on the tall hedgerows. Sometimes, as we breasted a rise, the light would sweep across pastures. There were no lights showing in this deep countryside, though off to our west the reflection of Plymouth’s street-lamps glowed against the clouds. It was only out at sea, I thought, that one found real darkness; absolute, impenetrable, black darkness. Everything was polluted ashore, even the night.

Charlie picked up his train of thought. “When I was growing up we used to look at your house and be real impressed by it. When I was just a tot I used to think God lived in Stowey, and it was damn nearly true. That was Lordy’s house, we were just his farm labourers, and I don’t suppose Lordy even knew we existed. But now look at us. I’ve got more money than all your lot put together.”

“Well done, Charlie.”

He smiled. “And you’re Lordy now.” The villagers had always called my father ‘Lordy’. They had not really liked the family, there were too many memories of past injustices, some of the memories stretching back five centuries; but, in their own way, they had been proud that the Earl and Countess of Stowey lived in their community. Now ‘Lordy’ was a penniless yachtsman and the labourer’s son drove a Jaguar.

And owned a house that was half the size of Stowey. I caught a glimpse of the big house as the Jaguar’s headlights slashed across its façade. My impression was of raw brick and broad glass. Charlie touched a button in the car and the triple garage doors clanked open. A dog began yelping in the kennels and Charlie shouted at it to be silent. “It isn’t a bad place,” he said of the house as he parked the car. “Cost me a penny or two.”

It was four o’clock in the morning, but Charlie made no effort to be silent. He crashed into the house, switching on lights and slamming doors. He went to the laundry room and fetched me a pair of dry jeans and a sweater. I changed in the kitchen where children’s drawings were held by magnets on the fridge door. “How many kids have you got now?” I asked him.

“Still just the two. Johnny and Sheila.” Johnny had been named after me, despite Charlie’s wife who didn’t like me. Sheila was named for Charlie’s mother. Yvonne, I reflected, did not have much say in how this family was run.

Charlie scooped ice out of the freezer and filled two glasses. Even when we’d been teenagers he had liked to take his drinks American fashion; that, for Charlie, was the height of sophistication, and he hadn’t changed. He grinned as I jettisoned the ice from my glass, then he filled it to the brim with single malt Scotch. “Cheers, Johnny.”

“Cheers, Charlie.”

It was good to be home. We touched glasses, then drank. Somewhere upstairs a child cried, and I heard footsteps as Yvonne went to soothe it. She must have heard Charlie’s arrival, but she did not come down.

“Come on, Johnny, let’s have a proper chat.” Charlie led me into a wide drawing room. Before he switched on the lights I saw that the windows looked across sloping pastures to one of Salcombe’s lakes, then the view was obliterated by the glare of electric lights. He put the whisky bottle on the table, sat me down in a leather armchair, then insisted on hearing the whole story of my night once more. “I’ve told you once,” I protested.

“But I want to hear it again, Johnny.”

So I told him again. And still nothing made sense.

I woke at midday. The sun was streaming past yellow curtains. A Thermos of coffee, a jug of orange juice and a packet of cigarettes lay on the bedside table. My jeans, newly washed and ironed, were folded on a chair with a clean shirt. A radio was playing somewhere in the house.

I washed, shaved with a razor that had been laid out for me in the bathroom, then went down to the kitchen. Yvonne was topping and tailing a bowl of string beans. She was a tall thin woman with long dark hair and very pale skin. She had grown up in Stowey’s village and had been the prettiest girl there when Charlie married her. She was still attractive, but now her frail beauty was sullied by an air of brittle nervousness. She wasn’t glad to see me. “In trouble again, Johnny?” She sounded awkward calling me ‘Jonnny’, but Charlie and I had long cured her natural urge to address me as ‘my lord’.

“The trouble’s not of my making, Yvonne.”

“It never is, is it? You want coffee?”

“I’ve got some.” I lifted the mug which I’d filled from the Thermos upstairs. “Nice house, Yvonne.”

“He likes it. He built it.” She said it dismissively.

“You don’t like it?”

“I liked living in the village. I miss my friends.” She tipped the vegetable scraps down the sink, then turned on the waste disposer. While the machine ground away she stared through the wide window at the far yachts on the distant water. “He likes it, though,” she said when the machine had stopped its din; then, with a wry look at me, “he likes to show off his money, you see.”

“Why shouldn’t he?”

“It’s the bank’s money, not ours.” She sniffed. “I suppose you’ll be staying here for a few days now?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“You will if he wants you to. What he wants, he gets. You’re supposed to join him now.”

“Where?”

“In the yard. It’s on the Exeter road. You can’t miss it, it’s got his name plastered all over it. He says to take the jeep.”

The jeep was a powerful Japanese four-by-four; what Charlie would call a proper piece of kit. I drove it to the Exeter road where, in Charlie’s vast yard, Sunflower was standing on the bed of a low-loader. She’d been expertly cradled in timber. It was obvious that someone had worked very fast and very skilfully that morning.

“I couldn’t get to sleep,” Charlie greeted me from her cockpit. “So I went over to George’s and knocked up the cradle myself. A proper job, eh?” He congratulated himself on his own carpentry, then tossed me down a lit cigarette. “You’re looking better.”

“I’m feeling better.” I climbed the ladder propped against Sunflower’s starboard flank. “Jesus,” I swore bitterly. Sunflower’s portside guardrail stanchions were stove in, the mast was nothing but a stump, and, as the mast had buckled and broken, it had lifted the coachroof out of true. The starboard cleats had ripped from the teak-planked steel deck, leaving two-foot holes edged with jagged splinters. The deck was thick with filth. The liferaft must have been triggered into action after Charlie and I had left, for it had inflated itself and now, torn and cut by the crane wires, lay bedraggled and wet over the foredeck. I stepped down into the cabin which stank of filthy river water. Everything was waterlogged. In the forepeak the tool drawers had splintered open. I found my pipe, passport and money and carried them back topsides. The boathooks were missing, the danbuoys had gone; almost anything which had not been shackled to the deck had dropped or floated away. The boat was a mess; a tragic mess.

“What damage?” Charlie asked cheerfully. “It’s nothing! I’ll have the cabin dried out by tomorrow, then we’ll put some chippies in to repair the joinery. I’ll shot-blast your hull properly, instead of the dog’s mess you were making of it, paint her up, and we’ll rig a new mast in a couple of weeks. Your sails are already drying in my paint shop.”

“I can’t afford a new mast,” I said bitterly.

“You probably can’t afford to buy my dinner either, but we won’t go hungry. Come on, you bastard, cheer up!”

“Charlie, I’m serious. I can’t afford it.”

He paused at the head of the ladder. “What’s friendship for if it can’t help out a mate, eh? Don’t be daft, Johnny. You won’t have to pay. I’ve already ordered your bloody mast. Now come on, I’m hungry as hell.”

We drove to a pub where the barmaids greeted Charlie with a kiss. He knew everyone, and had a word for all of them. He glad-handed the bar like a politician on the make, but then took me to a secluded corner where we could talk in peace. “I told them to make us a proper steak and kidney pie,” he said as he sat down. “You could do with some decent food.”

“Sounds good.”

“And no salad.” He drank half his pint. “Yvonne eats nothing but bloody salad. She read this article about diet in one of her women’s magazines. Jesus wept, I’m married to a rabbit. She told me I should give up the beer and the beef. Like hell, I said. I told her I expected a proper meal on my table, and by God she’d better provide it.”

I smiled. “You’ve got a happy marriage, Charlie?”

“You know how it is, Johnny.” He lit a cigarette. “They’re never happy, are they? You can give them the world and they’ll still find something to bitch about. But Yvonne’s all right.” He made the concession grudgingly. “She’s a good mother, anyway. Not that I’m home much. Business.”

“What were you doing in Hertfordshire?”

He touched a sly finger to the side of his nose. “Wasn’t actually in Hertfordshire, Johnny. More like Bedfordshire.” He laughed, then changed the subject. “I had a chat with George Cullen this morning.”

“I hope you thumped the bastard rotten.”

“He says he never told a soul where you were. I think he meant it too. He was upset about it.”

I wasn’t convinced. “Of course he told them! He knew who those men were, he even told me as much!”

“I know. He told me the same.” Charlie thickly smeared a bread roll with butter. “But I don’t think George did tell them. I think they just found you. After all, it isn’t difficult to find a boat on the Devon coast. How long can it take to search Plymouth, the Yealm, Salcombe, Dartmouth, Torquay and the Exe? Not long, mate, not long at all. I think you were just unlucky.”

“I want to make them unlucky,” I said with impotent bitterness. “And I want to know what bastard sent them to kill me, and why.”

He leaned back and frowned at me. “Do you really?” It was an odd question, asked in a strangely quizzical tone.

“They tried to kill me,” I said in outraged explanation, “and I want to know who sent them.” Till the day before I hadn’t cared about the painting, or its fate, or about the people who pursued the canvas, but my humiliation in the night had set up an atavistic desire for revenge.

We fell silent as the steak and kidney pie arrived. Charlie fetched two more pints, then ladled pie, potatoes, peas and gravy on to my plate. “What I mean,” he said, “is do you want anything more to do with that bloody painting?”

“Not with the painting, no.”

“Then bugger off. Sail away.” He pointed his knife at me. “Because so long as you’re here, they’ll chase you.”

I was staring through the window. “Elizabeth,” I said softly.

“What about her?”

“If I’m dead,” I said, “then there’ll be no legal complications about the painting’s ownership. And Garrard told me my sin was inheriting the painting. That’s it, Charlie! Don’t you see?” Then my voice tailed away. I was suggesting that Elizabeth wanted me dead so she could inherit the painting, but even as the explanation had convinced me, so I found it impossible to believe that my twin sister would do such a thing.

“For Christ’s sake!” Charlie protested in disgust. “The painting’s long gone, Johnny. It’s in some Texas vault or Swiss strongroom!”

“Is it?” I wondered aloud, then answered my own question. “I suppose it is, yes.”

“Of course it is!” Charlie said with sturdy good sense, “so sail away and forget the bloody thing. But eat your pie first.”

I leaned back. “I’ve just discovered something about myself.”

“You don’t like steak and kidney pie?”

“I get pissed off when people try to kill me.”

He laid down his knife and fork. “Listen, Johnny. If it’s any help, I’ll put the word out on Garrard. I’ll find him for you, and I’ll skin him alive. But don’t you hang about waiting for the chop. Go back to sea!”

It was good advice, but I was still suffering from the shameful memory of the previous night. “Garrard said he was making sure I never got possession of the painting. That suggests the thing is still around somewhere, Charlie…”

“Of course it isn’t around. Use your loaf, Johnny. It must have been flogged off four years ago. Garrard’s probably got his knickers in a twist, nothing else. But I promise you I’ll find him and I’ll discover who wound him up. You bugger off back to sea.”

“I’ll help you find him.”

“No.” He spoke very firmly. “You don’t need the trouble, Johnny. Leave it to experts.”

I smiled. “You’re an expert?”

“Enough of one.” He said it grimly. “You don’t need the aggravation, Johnny. All you need is to go back to sea.”

“I also need some transport.”

“Transport?” He sounded suspicious.

“Some wheels, Charlie. For a girl.”

He understood that reason well enough. He laughed. “Who is she?”

“Just a girl.” I was thinking of a competent girl with dark hair and a quick temper. A girl with an Italian name. “The trouble is,” I said, “that she’s a good distance away.”

“And you’ve got the itch. No problem.” Charlie spread his hands in a gesture suggesting that all my difficulties could be solved by his munificence. “Take the jeep. Go and chase her!”

“You don’t mind?”

“You’re my friend. What’s mine is yours, and what’s yours I wouldn’t touch with a bloody bargepole. Now eat your pie.”

I ate the pie.

Comerton Castle, Sir Leon Buzzacott’s country house, was neither a castle nor a house. It was a late-eighteenth-century monstrosity; a mansion built to display wealth rather than to be a home. Pillared, porticoed, winged, domed, spired, lavish and vast, Comerton had once belonged to a ducal family, but, just as they had to my own family, the taxmen had flensed away until the house had to be sold. Buzzacott had purchased it ten years before. I wondered what he did with all the rooms, reputedly a room for every day of the year. Not that I would find out, for my business did not lie in the main house, but in the great Orangery that was built beside the garden terraces beneath the south front.

The Orangery alone was the size of Stowey. It was a long single-storeyed building, stuccoed white, that had once been a glasshouse, summer house and Arcadian retreat for the Duke and his guests. Now, at astronomical expense, Sir Leon had transformed it into an art gallery. Many people had criticised the gallery, claiming it was too far from any large city, and that it was an elitist exercise aimed solely at gaining Sir Leon the coveted peerage he desired, and maybe they were right, at least in the first criticism, for there was only a handful of cars in the huge car park.

I paid my pound at the door. A moving ramp led to the gallery floor which had been excavated twenty feet below the original ground level. The job had been done without disturbing any of the Orangery’s masonry. The air below the ground was conditioned to a consistent coolness and humidity. Automatic louvres controlled the sunlight entering the glass domes and tall casements which, now that the floor had been lowered, served as clerestory windows.

I hadn’t asked for Jennifer Pallavicini at the entrance desk. I first wanted to see this rich man’s fantasy for myself. Sir Leon’s critics snidely called him Britain’s second-rate John Paul Getty. It would have been better, they said, if he had donated his collection to one of the big London galleries. They said his museum was a white elephant, a monstrous underground irrelevance; yet, in truth, it was magnificent. I’d seen photographs of the galleries and I had read the newspaper accounts of their extraordinary construction, but I had never visited, so I had never experienced the uncanny sense of peace in the subterranean halls. That quietness had earned accusations that Sir Leon was making a shrine to art when, according to modern London thinking, art should be an integral part of everyday life. Meaning, I suppose, that if someone wanted to slash a Rubens to shreds, then the act should be seen as necessarily therapeutic as well as a valid criticism. For my money these paintings were well away from London.

The collection was not big. Sir Leon had bought selectively, but what he had bought was of the very finest. The scarcity of paintings made it possible to hang each to its best advantage. Instead of crowding jumbled swathes of pictures along a wall, each canvas was positioned within its own private area. Sometimes, when juxtaposition would help explain a painting’s provenance, it would be displayed with others, but most of the paintings hung in solitary splendour. They hung on the outer walls of the gallery, protected by a dry moat. Visitors walked to a small balcony which faced each painting. There were no attendants visible in the gallery, which added to the quality of privacy and peace. The corridors leading to each balcony contained displays which explained the context and importance of the painting beyond the deep moat. The corridors led from the gallery’s central spine down which an endless walkway silently moved. Everything had been done to the highest quality and with exquisite taste. It would, I thought, be a fitting home for Stowey’s Van Gogh.

There was already one Van Gogh in the collection. It was a drawing done with black chalk and showed a woman digging in a bleak field. The notes in the corridor frankly said it was not the finest of Van Gogh’s drawings, but that it was included in the exhibition because, for the moment, Sir Leon owned no other works by the artist.

“It’s an early work.” Jennifer Pallavicini’s sudden voice startled me. “He did it in 1883. It’s rather clumsy.”

“Is it?” I turned to face her. She herself looked anything but clumsy, instead she was chillingly pretty. She was wearing a simple cream skirt and a striped silk blouse. She looked crisp, cool, competent, and distinctly unfriendly.

“It’s self-conscious.” She was looking at the drawing rather than at me. “When we get a suitable painting by Van Gogh we’ll hang this in Sir Leon’s private quarters. What are you doing here?”

“I came to see you.”

The brown eyes’ gaze flicked towards me. “We feared you’d come to steal another Van Gogh, Mr Rossendale.”

I ignored the jibe. “How did you know I was here?”

She gestured upwards and I saw how television cameras were monitoring every balcony. “So far,” she said, “we haven’t had any fools trying to throw paint or worse at a canvas, but you can never tell. We keep a constant watch. Why did you want to see me?”

“Those two men,” I said, then faltered, for her gaze was so disapproving and so off-putting that I felt gauche.

“I do remember them,” she said icily.

“They tried to murder me two days ago.”

“And evidently failed.” She leaned on the balcony, her back to the drawing. “Did you come here for sympathy?”

“Do we have to talk here?” I asked. I had suddenly found the quietness oppressive. The barely audible hiss of the hidden air-conditioners seemed somehow threatening.

She shrugged; then, without saying anything, walked back through the corridor. I followed her. We crossed the slow-moving walkway to a door which she opened with a key. She led me up a white-painted stair, through another door, and so into a small formal garden. I walked silently beside her down the gravel path, round an ornately sculpted fountain, to a stone balustrade that looked out on the Wiltshire countryside. A tractor was harrowing a far field, but otherwise nothing moved. “Well?” she asked.

“I don’t like people trying to murder me,” I said, and immediately thought how lame it sounded.

“I imagine that’s understandable. I didn’t much like it when that man molested me.” It was the most sympathetic thing she’d said to me so far, and it gave me encouragement.

“They attacked you,” I said, “and now they’ve attacked me. I just thought that together we might find some reason for what they’re doing.”

“Isn’t that a job for the police?” she challenged me.

I half smiled. “You went to the police?”

She hesitated, then shook her head. “What happened in Salcombe was trivial. It certainly wasn’t attempted murder. I have to be flattered that you think I might be able to help, but I suggest you should approach the real experts: the police.”

I leaned on the mossy stone balustrade. “If I went to the police, I’d have to tell them what happened in Salcombe. They’ll want to talk to you.”

“I have nothing to hide, Mr Rossendale.”

“Nor do I.” I spoke with sudden vehemence. “You don’t seem to understand, no one does. I did not steal that painting, I had nothing to do with its theft, yet everyone, you included, seems convinced I did steal it. Why on earth would I want to steal it?”

“The usual theory, Mr Rossendale, is that you did it to spite your mother. You hated her, did you not?”

I hesitated. “I didn’t hate her. I just disliked her.”

“So the theory is partially correct. To that we add all the other evidence, and you must agree that you remain the likeliest suspect.”

“For God’s sake! That evidence was all circumstantial!”

She let that protest die away on the summer’s air, then began a remorseless cataloguing of the evidence. “A week before the painting was to be transported, you removed it from your mother’s room.”

“She asked me to. She didn’t want to be constantly reminded that it was leaving Stowey.”

“You claim to have stored it in the gun room, to which only you had a key.”

“Rubbish. There were a dozen keys. My sister had a key, half the servants had keys.”

“Not according to the police. The painting was in your charge, Mr Rossendale, your fingerprints were the only ones found on the door’s lockplate, and you told your mother that you had hidden the painting away and told no one its exact whereabouts.” Her voice was biting with disbelief and scorn. “Yet on the morning of the removal, it wasn’t there! It’s a perfect mystery, isn’t it? A locked room, undisturbed alarms, and a missing painting. I suppose you’ll tell me that dozens of people knew how to disable the alarm system?”

“One or two knew,” I said feebly.

“And where were you the next day? When everyone else was desperately trying to help the police? You were sailing across the Channel! No doubt carrying the painting with you, but of course no one suspected you that day, why should they? You were the Earl of Stowey, the apparent victim of the crime, but since then, my lord, your protestations of innocence have worn a little thin. Isn’t it a fact that every guilty man protests his innocence, and does so as vehemently as you are now?”

“But why on earth would I steal from myself?” I challenged her with the obvious defence.

“Clearly from your dislike of your mother. So long as she was alive she shared control of the Stowey Trust with you, and doubtless she would have spent the proceeds of the painting in ways you did not like.”

She was so damnably cool. Most of the evidence she had adduced was true, but it was still circumstantial or coincidental. I hadn’t stolen the Sunflowers. I closed my eyes, wondering how I could convince her. “Please listen,” I said. I opened my eyes to see her level, judgmental gaze on me. “Those two men came to kill me. I’m trying to find out why they did it because, truly, I don’t understand. They said they wanted to prevent me from getting hold of the painting, but I can’t do that because I don’t know where it is.”

She laughed scornfully at my protestation of ignorance. “I can quite imagine why they should want you dead.”

“For God’s sake, why?”

She hesitated, then evidently decided to speak her brutal version of the truth. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s four years since the painting was stolen, and in those four years we’ve heard nothing. There hasn’t been a whisper. We’ve been listening, Mr Rossendale, because there are art dealers who know about stolen paintings and we’ve been paying them to pass on any rumour they might hear, but in four years? Nothing. Now, suddenly, there’s a flurry of activity. A man questions me brutally, the same man allegedly tries to kill you. And what has changed? Two things, Mr Rossendale. First your mother has died, and secondly you have come home. Doesn’t that suggest something?”

“Not to me.”

“Oh, come!” she protested at what she perceived as my intransigence. “If the painting had been recovered while your mother was alive, she would have shared in the proceeds of its legitimate sale. Now, under the terms of the Stowey Trust, you are the sole beneficial owner. Clearly it is now in your strong interest to retrieve the painting and place it on the open market.”

“Jesus wept,” I said in frustrated anger at her glib assumption of my guilt.

“It isn’t my place to speculate,” Jennifer said, but proceeded to do so anyway, “but I would imagine that the two men are working for whoever you sold the painting to. That person clearly does not want you to betray his possession of stolen goods, so is taking care to silence you. Doubtless you sold it four years ago for a derisory sum, or else you would not need to reclaim it now. It’s a classic case of thieves falling out, and it’s all rather sordid, and I find it more than a little insulting that you should see fit to involve me in your attempts to avoid trouble.”

“I’m not a thief,” I said in hopeless protest.

“So you say. But you should know that Sir Leon considers your guilt or innocence entirely irrelevant. If you can give us any information that will lead to the Van Gogh’s recovery, then you’ll be well rewarded as well as handsomely paid for the painting itself.”

“I don’t give a monkey’s toss about Sir Leon’s reward,” I said brutally, “but I do give a damn about people who try to have me killed.”

“That’s just masculine pride,” she said scornfully. “No one ever accused you of humility.”

“You know nothing about me,” I said angrily.

She smiled. “I know a great deal about you, my lord.” She made the honorific sound like an insult. “We’ve spent four years searching for that painting, and our starting point, and our ending point, is always you. So, my lord, I am somewhat of an expert on your grubby life. You were expelled from three public schools, you’ve been arrested four times…”

“Just drunk and disorderlies,” I protested, “nothing else. Anyone can get pissed.”

“One charge of grievous bodily harm,” she insisted icily. “You served two months in a Tasmanian jail for that.”

She had done her homework. No one had ever known that it had been the twenty-eighth Earl of Stowey in that jail, but she had somehow discovered it. Mind you, the bastard I had knifed had been pleading for trouble, but I didn’t think Jennifer Pallavicini would be amenable to that excuse. “It was all a long time ago,” I said feebly.

“You’re a very destructive man.” She ignored my plea of mitigation. “In previous times, my lord, you’d have been sent to a forgotten corner of the empire as a remittance man. Doubtless your family was very relieved when you and your friend decided to sail away. Oh, I know about Mr Barratt, too. What was his attraction for you? Was it simply that your family hated his influence on you, so naturally you flaunted him in front of them?”

“No,” I said, “he’s a friend.”

“But he’s settled down, which must leave you friendless, and doubtless not a little short of cash as well. Is that why you’re here, my lord? Do you want some money to hire your own thugs who’ll protect you while you double-cross your former accomplices?”

Her tone was deliberately offensive, but I did not answer. I had been staring at the green pastures, at the slow tractor, and at the long hedgerows which were bright with stitchwort and campion. I was suddenly assailed by the strangest notion that I didn’t want to go away again. I wanted to stay. I’d had my adventures, and it was time to put down some roots. I’d seen the ending of the sea-gypsies, I’d seen them dying of fevers and the pox, I’d seen them selling their bodies in lousy little towns, I’d seen them crawling home in boats that were lashed together with fraying coir and untarred manila, and I suddenly felt lonely. I disliked the feeling. I forgot it as I made one last attempt to convince Jennifer Pallavicini of my innocence. “Do you really think,” I said, “that if I’d stolen the painting, I’d rock the boat now? If I’d sold it to someone, and was now trying to get it back, I’d probably end up in jail myself! Why should I risk that?”

“Because doubtless you don’t believe that you are in risk of a jail sentence.” She pushed herself away from the balustrade. “Do you know where the painting is?”

“Of course I don’t. I’ve already told you that.”

“Did you steal it?”

“No!”

“Can you tell me anything that might help us to recover it?”

“Beyond what I’ve told you, no.”

“Then I fail to see how you can help us. You’ll find the car park is through that gate. Good day to you, my lord.” She walked away.

“Where’s my sweater?” I called after her.

She did not turn round, but just waved in negligent reply. It was just possible, I thought, that she raised two fingers as she waved. She was very beautiful, and I was very wretched.

So go back to sea, I told myself, where nothing matters except the wind and the waters and the cold high stars. Because here, on land, I was everybody’s scapegoat, but there I was as good as the next man and better than most. And it was there, despite my sudden wish to stay ashore, that I belonged, so it was there that I would have to go.

Charlie was sharpening his chisels when I got back to his yard. “What’s got up your nose?” he asked.

I told him about my visit to Buzzacott’s gallery, and how the girl I had been chasing worked for Buzzacott. Charlie was scornful of my amateur sleuthing. “You’re a berk, Johnny, a prize berk” – he stropped a blade on his palm and gave me a long-suffering smile – “you should know better than to get involved.”

“I offered to help her find the painting,” I explained.

“What painting? It’s gone, Johnny. If you miss it, buy yourself a tin of yellow emulsion and paint another.” He tested the newly sharpened chisel by slicing away a sliver of his thumbnail then, satisfied, dropped the blade into his toolbox. “I made you a new chart table. Say thank you.”

“Thank you,” I said. Behind us Sunflower was shrouded in a canvas tent ready for the professional shot-blasters who were coming the next day. I hated to think what the work was going to cost, and said as much.

“That’s my problem,” Charlie said. “I’ve told you I’ll pay, and I will. You did enough for me in the old days, so you don’t need to feel embarrassed now.”

Yet I was embarrassed, because Charlie was clearly spending a small fortune on Sunflower’s repair, but as the days passed I also saw how much pleasure he was taking from the work. “I’d forgotten how much fun you can have in getting a boat ready for sea,” he told me more than once. He threw himself enthusiastically at the task, so enthusiastically that it seemed at times as if Sunflower was his boat and not mine. Whatever she needed, he was determined to supply, but only the very best. He would leave the house at dawn, drive down to the yard, and start work. He found rust under the transducer plugs, so nothing would serve but that the fittings were drilled out of the hull and new steel fairings made for the depth-sounder and Pitot log heads. Charlie welded the new fairings into place himself and afterwards, in his old fashion, congratulated himself on a well-done piece of work. “Proper job, that.”

In the next busy days there were dozens of ‘proper jobs’ performed on Sunflower. Her shot-blasted hull was anti-fouled and, above the blue bootline, painted a dazzling white. Her liferaft was sent away to be repaired and restowed in its canister. The guardrail stanchions were replaced, and new lifelines rigged from bow to stern. Her cabin joinery was repaired with a lovely pale oak, but not before Charlie had rewired the whole boat. “I needed a holiday,” he told me when I wondered how his business was managing without him, though in fact Sunflower simply became Charlie’s temporary office. He had a cordless telephone in his tool box and, if a problem would not yield to bullying on the phone, he would drop down from Sunflower’s gunwales and stride across to his real office. I was grateful for his continual presence; just to be with Charlie gave me a sense of being physically protected from Garrard and Peel, while working with him brought back memories of happy days.

The biggest difference between our old days and these new ones was the amount of money we now lavished on Sunflower. A new VHF radio was installed, one that was pre-tuned to all the American and European frequencies. Charlie wasn’t content with such a lavish toy, but insisted on installing a short-wave radio as well. “So you can listen to all those posh voices on the BBC.” He patted the panel which he’d made to house the twin radios. “Proper job, that.”

I had to dig my heels in and refuse some of his suggestions. I was tempted by a Satnav set, which snatched position reports from passing satellites, but I have a fear of too many electronic toys on a boat, so I wouldn’t let him buy one. He had a Decca set which he claimed to have taken off one of his old boats and which he insisted on installing over Sunflower’s chart table. I couldn’t refuse the gift, but as Decca will only give positions in a limited number of waters I did not fear that I would become too used to its electronic magic and forget how to use a sextant. Charlie wanted me to have a radar set, but I adamantly refused; they drain too much electricity and their aerials look too ugly. I won that battle, but Charlie won others: he insisted that the new mast should have an electronic wind direction and speed vane which would display on twin dials in the cockpit and above the chart table. He made new chart drawers, and filled them with brand new charts. He took a small boy’s pleasure in surprising me with new purchases: danbuoys for the stern; a radio direction finder; a stripper for the propeller; a sun awning for the hot latitudes; and bright red canvas dodgers with Sunflower’s name sewn large in brilliant yellow letters. Best of all he bought me a new fibreglass tender with a small outboard. “You can burn that scabby inflatable,” he said.

It all cost money. So much money. Embarrassing amounts of money. I tackled Charlie about the cost, but he simply dismissed my embarrassment. “I’m enjoying it, Johnny. That’s all that matters.”

“You must let me pay you back.”

“What with? Bottle tops?” He grinned. We’d been working till well past nine o’clock and had driven over to the Rossendale Arms for a good-night pint. Some hotel guests from Stowey sat at the bar and sneaked surreptitious looks at me; the landlord had probably told them they were staying in my ancestral home, but I could see from their faces that they weren’t sure whether to believe that the paint-stained scruff truly was a belted earl.

“What is Sunflower costing you?” I pressed Charlie.

“I’m not counting.” He leaned back on the settle and stretched his long arms. “I’m enjoying myself, Johnny. It’s been too long since I did a proper job. I spend too much of my time on the bloody phone these days, or in the office. I like working with these.” He held out his hands, big and scarred. “Besides, it’s a way of making up to you.”

“Making up to me?” I said with astonishment.

“Fetch me a pint, and I’ll tell you.”

I fetched two pints. That was something I’d miss, I thought, the good taste of proper ale instead of the gassy piss-weak lager that the Germans had persuaded the rest of the world to drink.

Charlie lit himself a cigarette. “I always felt guilty about deserting you,” he said in explanation.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“It’s true.” He was entirely serious. “When we flew back from Australia I was really looking forward to going back to sea. We had some good times, you and I. But then I got Yvonne pregnant so, like a fool, I did the decent thing.”

He was speaking of the time after my brother’s suicide, four years before. It had been a bad time for me; trammelled with accountants, lawyers and bank managers. I had thought then that I would be trapped by all those responsibilities and, though Charlie and I had often talked of going back to sea, I had never been certain that it would be possible. I used to escape Stowey’s hopelessness by delivering yachts in the Channel, but I had doubted whether I could ever afford to sail far oceans again; Stowey’s problems were too comprehensive for such luxuries. Charlie felt guilty that he had abandoned me, but he had never known that I had been considering abandoning him. I confessed as much to him now, but Charlie shook his head dismissively. “Of course you were going back to sea! I knew that. You were never going to stay with all those pin-striped wankers for longer than you had to!” He laughed. “Could you see yourself living with your mother?”

I smiled. “No.”

“There you are, then. But I should have gone with you, Johnny, I really should.”

“No regrets, surely?”

“I’ve made some money, I suppose.” He sounded rueful. He looked at his watch. “We’ve got an early start in the morning, you and I, so drink up.”

A week later Sunflower was taken to Kingswear where she was craned into the water. Next day Charlie and I drove to the marina where one of his mobile cranes was parked on the quay. “Lower it now!” Charlie took competent command as soon as he stepped out of the Jaguar’s driving seat. He shouted up at his crane driver, “You take care, Tom! Gentle with her now!”

We were stepping Sunflower’s mast; a brand new foil-shaped beauty of extruded aluminium. Charlie had paid for it, of course, just as he had paid to have all the sails cleaned, and a new trysail made. He insisted on glueing a silver sixpence under the mast’s foot for luck, but after that ritual he was content to let the riggers get on with their job while he and I moved to the greater comfort of Barratry.

Barratry was Charlie’s boat. A few days earlier, in anticipation of these days on the River Dart, he had moved her to the Kingswear marina. She was a fifty-four-foot motor cruiser with a flying bridge, twin monster diesels, and the hot tub which had so impressed Rita. Her name was a pun on Charlie’s surname, but the word also meant any fraudulent maritime act. To Charlie it carried overtones of piracy, which he liked. “Mind you, I’d have preferred to call her Wet Dream,” Charlie laughed, “but none of the girls liked it.”

At midday one of those girls arrived on Barratry’s pontoon. Charlie introduced her as a business colleague, but offered me a broad wink at the same time. Her name was Joanna and she was ordered to make lunch on board. “A proper dinner, mind you!” Charlie warned her. “No bloody salads, girl. Johnny here’s going to sail to the West Indies in a few days so he needs feeding up.”

Joanna was a redhead, lithe as a whippet in skin-tight jeans and an expensive shirt. She seemed not to resent Charlie’s unbridled caveman chauvinism, but Charlie had always treated his women thus. It worked for him.

We ate lunch on Barratry while the three riggers tensioned Sunflower’s stays and shrouds. Joanna had carved two cold roasted chickens. One was solely for Charlie who, though he had the appetite of a horse, never seemed to put on an ounce of fat. “Are you really going to the West Indies?” Joanna had picked at a chicken wing, and now painted her fingernails while we ate.

“Probably.” In truth I was too late for a good trade-wind passage, but I might yet make the crossing before the hurricane season. “I’ll go south first, then make up my mind.”

“When will you leave?”

“As soon as he’s provisioned,” Charlie answered for me. “And no difficulties there, eh, Johnny?” Charlie had opened accounts for me at a half-dozen Dartmouth stores. Whatever I or Sunflower needed, we were to have: food, equipment, clothing, anything.

“Where will you go in the West Indies?” Joanna persisted.

“Probably one of the French islands. The food’s better.”

“And the girls.” Charlie was in high spirits. The sun was out, he was well fed, and Joanna had changed into a wispy bikini. “I’ve got half a mind to fly over there and join you,” he said. “We could have some good sailing, eh?”

“Do you still remember how to sail?” I teased him. “My God, Charlie, to think you’ve bought a motor boat!”

“It’s less trouble than rag-hanging,” he shrugged. “Mind you, I miss the sailing sometimes, but there’s a lot to be said for a good motor yacht.”

“Tell me one thing.”

“The beds are wider,” he grinned. Despite his professed nostalgia for sail, he was clearly proud of Barratry. “She’s a good sea boat,” he claimed with a fervour that made me suspect it wasn’t true. He gave me the guided tour, proudly showing me her radar system, the twin state rooms with their king-size beds and television sets, the immaculate engine room, and finally the famous hot tub. “I hardly ever take the damn thing’s cover off,” he said apologetically, “because it’s a bugger to fill up, and there’s hardly room for two in it, but the bloody salesman sold me on it.”

After lunch we fired up the motors and took Barratry out into the Channel. It was a warm bright day and Charlie opened up the throttles so that the twin propellers whipped a path of cream across a sun-glittering sea. The boat banged across the small waves, jarring from crest to crest, but, despite the discomfort, it was still an impressive display of power. “What’s her top speed?” I shouted.

“I’ve had thirty-eight knots out of her.” He throttled back, letting the hull settle into the water. We were already out of sight of land, but the Decca repeater on the flying bridge offered us a course straight back to Dartmouth. Charlie let the big boat idle while he opened two bottles of beer. Joanna came out of the cabin beneath us and went to the foredeck where she casually discarded her bikini top before stretching out on deck.

“Not a bad looker, eh?” Charlie wanted my approval.

“Every boat should have one,” I agreed.

“She works for a construction firm I do a fair bit of work for. She tells me how much to tender, and if her boss wonders why she’s got the money to buy a BMW then he’s got too much sense to ask. I might bend the rules a bit, Johnny, but I provide a damned good service. Hey! Joanna! We can’t see you properly! Come closer!”

“Get lost, Charlie.”

He laughed. He looked immensely happy. He sat on the helmsman’s chair, stripped to the waist, and I could see that he was as muscled as ever. He had always been tough, with immense stamina, and monetary success had not softened him. His skin was flecked with welding burns and scars, making him look as strong and battered as one of his beloved hand-tools, but, in the days I’d worked with him on Sunflower, I’d seen a new wariness in his eyes. Some of Charlie’s toughness had become mental and I guessed he was now a ruthless man to do business with, but I was an old friend, so the ruthlessness was never turned on me. “I might just do that, you know,” he said suddenly.

“You might do what?”

“Fly over to the West Indies. I’ll need a break soon, and I could take a week or two with you. We’ll drink some whisky, find some women, sail some blue water.”

“Sounds good, Charlie.”

“Like old times.” He had taken his eyes off Joanna and was staring moodily at the southern horizon. “My God, but things have changed. Do you remember our first boat?” It had been a fifteen-foot clinker-built wooden dinghy with a gaffed main and a pocket-sized jib. Charlie laughed suddenly. “You remember those two scrubbers we picked up in Cherbourg? Bloody hell, but I thought we’d have to push them overboard to get rid of them.”

I smiled. “I remember their boyfriends chasing us.”

“We saw them off, though, didn’t we?” Or rather Charlie had seen them off. I’d helped, but Charlie’s strength was awesome. We’d been eighteen then, cocksure and cockfree, lords of the Channel. We’d crossed in the dinghy to France on a night as cold as charity and we’d been ready for mayhem when we arrived in Cherbourg. “It was a good weekend,” I said.

“We had lots of them, my friend. Lots of them.” He lit a cigarette. “And we had some bad ones, too. Do you remember the food poisoning?”

Charlie had nearly died after eating some fish we’d caught off the reefs in French Polynesia. I’d nursed him back to health, but it had been a close thing. He grimaced. “I haven’t eaten fish since.”

“You remember the Tasman Sea?” I asked. That had been another bad time, a bitter ship-killing storm which had threatened to overwhelm us, but Charlie’s extraordinary stamina had seen us through. I had been at breaking point, past it in truth, but Charlie had sung his way through.

He smiled at the memory, but didn’t comment. Instead he shook his head wistfully. “I do envy you, Johnny.”

“I can’t think why.”

“Of course you can.” He lightly punched my upper arm. “Free as a bird, aren’t you? No kids, no wife, no accountant. Just wall-to-wall Joannas wherever you go.”

“Not always, Charlie.”

“But enough, eh?” he asked seriously.

“Enough,” I reassured him.

“You’re a lucky bastard.”

“Meaning you’re not?” I gestured at the near-naked Joanna on the foredeck.

“Responsibilities,” he said darkly. He tossed his empty beer bottle overboard and lit a cigarette. “I don’t know, Johnny. I like making money, but the more you’ve got, the more the bastards try to take it away from you, so the more you have to work to hang on to it. I work bloody hard now, and it’s beginning to interfere with my pleasures. But when you and I sailed together it seemed to be nothing but beer and bare bodies.”

“That’s because I was doing all the work.”

He laughed. A mile off Barratry’s port beam a big ketch was close-hauled on a course for France. She looked like a proper boat, one that could take the blue water and Charlie watched her wistfully. “If I could make two million tomorrow, Johnny, I’d jack it all in. I’d follow you.”

I smiled. “It doesn’t take two million, Charlie.”

“But it does, Johnny. It does. I have to settle with the banks, you see. And I can’t just abandon Yvonne and the kids. I’ll have to leave them with some money. But if I had two million now I’d pay the debts, sell the company and never work again. In five years’ time I might just be ready to do it, but now? Now I’d need two big ones to be really safe.” He opened another bottle of beer. “Those two blokes, Johnny. They’ve scarpered.”

The change of subject was so abrupt that for a few seconds I couldn’t think what he was talking about. In the last few days I had become so absorbed in Sunflower’s repairs that I had almost forgotten Garrard and Peel. “How do you know?” I asked.

“Because I’ve been pulling in favours, Johnny. Asking questions. But no one knows where they are. Mind you, on the principle that most shit ends up in a cesspit, it’s likely that they’ve gone to London, but I’ve put the word around that if they show their scabby faces in Devon again, I’ll bury them.” He punched me lightly on the arm. “Forget ’em, Johnny. Just worry about getting back to sea.”

Which was all I was worrying about now. The memory of that bad night in Cullen’s yard was fading. At first I’d wanted to find Garrard, and repay him, but I’d been humiliated when I went to ask Jennifer Pallavicini for help, so now they could all get on without me.

“Charlie?” Joanna sat up On the foredeck. “Put some lotion on my back, will you?”

He winked at me, offered me the wheel, then went forward. He stayed with Joanna, evidently lotioning more than her back, while I climbed to the lower wheelhouse where I hunched down so that I couldn’t see what was happening. I was suddenly jealous.

I supposed that my mistake had been to come home. Till that moment when I had plunged through the broken water of Salcombe’s bar I had been a happy man. Now, suddenly, inexplicably, I was frustrated. One part of me did not want to go back to sea. It was not that I would ever abandon sailing, so long as I lived I would need blue seas at my boat’s cutwater, but I wanted something else now. I wanted a place to come home to. I wanted someone.

But there was no place, and no one. I was unwanted, except by my sister Georgina, and she was mad, so I would go back to nowhere because, for me, there was nothing else.

I sailed a week later. I’d provisioned in Dartmouth but, before leaving England, I sailed round the corner into Salcombe to say goodbye to Charlie. I moored alongside Barratry off Frogmore Creek and Charlie brought Yvonne and the children out to the boats. He also brought two bottles of champagne, one of which we broke over Sunflower’s bow fairlead, and the other we drank. Charlie insisted his children both took a glass, even the two-year-old. Yvonne seemed determined to disguise her dislike of me and to enjoy herself, or perhaps she was just glad that I was sailing out of her life again. She’d brought a picnic of cake and sandwiches and made tea in Barratry’s galley. Charlie filled the hot tub on the bows and let the children splash around as we talked about old times. We laughed at the memories of Charlie’s poaching expeditions, and Yvonne shyly recalled how he’d once stolen my father’s Bentley and parked it outside the house of a notorious local whore. It was a happy afternoon, and I was glad, for I didn’t like to think of Charlie and Yvonne embittered.

They all went ashore at tea-time. I held Charlie back before he joined Yvonne and the children in his dinghy. “I want to say thank you, Charlie.”

“For nothing.” He was embarrassed. He glanced round to make sure Yvonne was well out of earshot. “I’ll see you in the Caribbean, right?”

“Right.”

“Maybe I’ll bring Joanna. Unless you tell me there’s a surplus of crumpet over there?”

I smiled. “There always is, Charlie.”

He punched me on the arm. “See you, Johnny.”

“Be good, Charlie.”

He paused, then roughly embraced me. “You’re a lucky bugger,” he said, then he climbed over the guardrails and dropped into his dinghy’s stern. His outboard coughed into life as I untied the painter. Charlie waved, then steered away. The tide was on the turn, about to ebb, and I was alone again.

I was provisioned, I had filled in the Customs’ form, I was ready. I had one port to visit, then I would be free. There didn’t seem any purpose to be served by waiting so I pulled my new rigid tender aboard and stowed it aft of the liferaft on the coachroof. I opened the motor’s seacock, gave the stern-gland a turn of grease, then started the engine. The wind was coming dead from the harbour entrance, so I’d need to motor out to sea. Once at sea there would be no hurry, ever again, so I’d let the sails do the work. I cast off the lines which held me to Barratry, pulled in the fenders, then turned Sunflower’s bows to the wind and let the motor idle as I hoisted the big main. I let her drift on the slack water as I hoisted the foresails. The red ensign, battered from a hundred foreign gales, lifted at the stern. I turned to stare ashore, but Charlie’s dinghy was already lost among a host of other little craft. There was no one to bid me farewell.

I put the throttle forward.

I’d been home just over a month. My mother had died, my sister had spurned me, two men had tried to kill me, and now I was leaving. I should have felt some regret, but I didn’t. Neither regret, nor sadness, just the excitement of another voyage beginning, and when I felt that small familiar excitement I knew that the self-pitying disease that had made me want to stay ashore was gone. I was cured. My spirits rose as the boat gathered speed. The engine thudded happily. The sails, sheeted in tight, flapped desultorily and the compass shivered on its lubber line.

I turned due south at the fairway and let the wind belly the sails. I throttled back, allowing the wind to share the engine’s load. There was a shudder in the sea as we crossed the bar, then the bows dipped to the first real wave and a shred of white foam spattered back on to Sunflower’s gunwales. The tide was beginning to help me so I leaned down and cut the motor, silencing my world to everything except the noises of water and sails and ropes. Sunflower heeled to the wind, and the tiller stiffened in my hand.

It was a good wind, a skirt-lifting force five or six; just enough to break some water across our bows. I could feel the raw and lovely power in Sunflower’s big sails now. She was hissing in the water, smashing the waves, creaming them back, driving through a five-foot swell like a thoroughbred. The wind was more westerly than south, a perfect wind to cross the Channel. I had to keep an appointment in Jersey before I left home waters, then I would be gone to the wild seas. Just one more duty, then I’d be running alone and the bastards couldn’t touch me ever again because, once more, I would be alone and lost and free.

They called it a Convent Hospital, but in truth it was just a big Victorian house that stood on the heights near La Corbiere Point. The sisters and their patients enjoyed six acres of land that fell steeply towards the sea. I left Sunflower in the St Helier Marina and rented a bike that I pedalled along the island’s southern shore.

“She’ll be glad to see you, so she will.” Sister Felicity limped beside me down a path which twisted between laurels and rose bushes. I had tried to persuade her not to walk with me, for she looked desperately tired and old, but she had insisted on coming. “I’m not so old that I can’t lean on an old friend’s arm,” she told me. “And when I heard you were coming, Johnny, I promised myself I’d have a day out of bed. And how are you?”

“I still seem to be getting into trouble, Nanny. I don’t try, but it comes all the same.”

“It’s your Irish blood, Johnny. But I have faith in you, so I do. One day you’ll take responsibility for someone, and that’s the day you’ll settle down.” Sister Felicity was pure Irish. She had once been our family’s nanny at Stowey, but after we had all left the nursery she had gone to take the veil. Her fondness for and familiarity with Georgina had made this pleasant house an obvious refuge for my younger sister. “Mind you,” Sister Felicity went on, “it’s past time you did settle down. You can’t gallivant for ever.”

“Why ever not?”

She paused to take breath. I was worried for her health, but she was more worried about me. “You should have children, Johnny. What will happen to the Earldom if you don’t make an heir?”

“The Earldom’s gone, Nanny,” I said bleakly. “It disappeared with the house. We’re nothing now. We’re just a tired old family that has squabbled its life away. In a few years we’ll all be gone and no one will even remember us.”

“You’re so full of it, your eyes are brown!” She smiled at her own coarseness. As a child, as now as a man, I loved this woman far more than my real mother. Felicity had no guile, just a heart of pure affection. Now, unwell, she held my arm tightly as we began to walk again. “I’m sorry I couldn’t cross to England for your mother’s funeral,” she told me, “it wasn’t one of my well days.”

I wondered if she ever had well days any more. “You should rest, Nanny.”

“Ah, the Lord will give me rest in due time. But I wept for your mother, poor thing.”

“I didn’t,” I confessed brutally. “I haven’t even requested a Mass for her.”

“You should, Johnny. She was never good to you, but she gave you life for all that.”

“And she accused me of stealing her painting.”

“Who cares about a painting?” She stopped where the steps turned towards the sea and we could see a small sun terrace where three patients and a nun sat on wrought-iron chairs. “And there the dear thing is!” Felicity said. “You go on alone, Johnny, I’m not sure I can manage the last steps.”

The ‘dear thing’ was the Lady Georgina Rossendale, but I did not go straight down to her, preferring to stay a few more seconds with Sister Felicity. “Is everything all right here, Nanny?”

“With God’s blessing it will be. The diocese is always talking about selling the house, and I could see why they’d want to because it must be worth a wee fortune, but so far, thank God, they haven’t done it. But if they do, Johnny, we’ll just pick up our skirts and find somewhere else. Don’t you worry yourself.”

“And Georgina?”

“On her good days she misses Stowey.” Felicity made a small gesture of resignation. “Not that she has many good days, but when she does I sometimes think her understanding is just beneath the surface, like a bubble that only needs a little nudge if it’s going to burst, but then she falls away again. Poor thing. But she’s never any trouble, never at all. She’ll be glad to see you.”

I went down to the terrace, but it was not one of Georgina’s good days. At first I was not even sure that she recognised me. She was placid, smiling softly, and gentle. I told her about Sunflower, and perhaps she understood some of what I said, for she pointed out to sea where a slew of yachts were catching the tide before turning north towards Guernsey. Lunch was brought to the terrace on trays and I gently fed Georgina and mopped up her spills.

I left her in mid-afternoon. I climbed the steps, and only then did I learn that Georgina had remembered me, for, just before I would have disappeared behind the screen of bushes, she called my name. “Johnny? Johnny?”

I went back to her. “My love?”

She was crying. She was crying very softly, but the tears were flowing in copious and silent misery. She reached desperately for my hand. “I want to go home.”

“Are you unhappy?”

“I miss you.”

“Nanny’s here,” I said, then, in case Georgina had forgotten the nursery at Stowey, “Sister Felicity’s here.”

“She’ll die! She’s going to die, Johnny, and I’ll be alone.”

“No, no, no.” I held her tight, and I cried because there was sweet sod all I could do. I held her for a long time. Dear God, I thought, but what misery lay in this girl’s madness? I remembered that the last time I had been with Georgina in this garden had been after our brother’s death. Did she, somewhere in her tangled mind, connect me with death? John, Earl of Stowey, death’s messenger? I held her tight.

When I relaxed my embrace to look into her face, I saw that she had gone back into her mysterious world of gentle nothingness. I kissed her cheeks and she smiled at me, remembering nothing of her desperate fears. She seemed happy again, but I was still crying.

I climbed the garden steps and let myself into the main house to seek out Sister Felicity, but a young nun told me Felicity had been ordered back to her bed. I thanked the girl, then pulled out all my small change which I put into the box beside the door. I wouldn’t need British coins again for a long while, maybe never.

“Behold a miracle! The Earl of Stowey is giving money to charity!” I turned, astonished, to see my twin sister Elizabeth coming from the convent office. Her husband, Lord Tredgarth, was two paces behind her. He nodded at me with heavy disapproval, while Elizabeth just looked scornful. “I heard you had come to visit this morning,” she said, “but I hardly expected to find you still here.”

“I came to say goodbye.”

“You’re going somewhere?”

I shrugged. “Wherever.”

“Don’t let me stop you, brother.”

I didn’t move. The meeting, was unexpected and sudden, yet, despite Elizabeth’s rudeness, it seemed churlish just to walk away. I was also very curious about what had brought Elizabeth here. She looked very chic in a black summer dress and with her bright blonde hair cut expensively short. She wore a single row of pearls and had an expensive-looking handbag. Peter Tredgarth was certainly not paying for such baubles, and I wondered who was. She glared at me, expecting me to leave, but I stayed put as the silence stretched in the big cool hallway which smelt of wax polish and disinfectant. Lord Tredgarth was the first of the three of us to be embarrassed by the silence. “You found Georgina well, John?”

“No,” I said, “she’s frightened of the future.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, John,” Elizabeth snapped. “She’s half-witted, so how does she even know what the future is?”

“She’s frightened that Nanny will die and leave her alone.”

“There’s certainly no point in her looking to you for any security if that happens, is there? What have you ever done for her?”

“Loved her?”

“Don’t be impertinent. We’ve all loved Georgie. But some of us have to be practical as well.” She looked at her watch, then grimaced at my dirty jeans and unironed shirt. “Are you flying back to the mainland now?”

“No.”

“Then I needn’t offer you a lift to the airport.” She sounded relieved. “Come along, Peter.”

I frowned. “You mean you didn’t come here to visit Georgina?”

“I came here, brother, to make sure that her funds are still adequate. As I said, some of us try to be practical. There really isn’t any point in wasting our time by seeing her; she doesn’t know me from Catherine the Great, but that doesn’t prevent me from worrying about her welfare. Now come along, Peter, we have a taxi waiting.”

Her high heels cracked and snapped over the parquet floor. I moved into her path, making her stop and provoking a look of utter disdain.

An alarm bell had rung faintly in my head. I did not trust Elizabeth when she spoke of Georgina’s funds. Elizabeth is constantly short of money, made so by her husband’s ineptitude as a farmer and his failures as an investor. “Are Georgina’s funds adequate?” I asked her now.

“Entirely. You don’t have to worry. Not that you ever did. Now stand aside, please.”

“Tell me something,” I said on a pure impulse. “Did you send two men to kill me?”

Anger blazed in Elizabeth’s eyes. “Peter. If John doesn’t move out of my way, then kindly remove him for me.”

Her husband loomed closer. He’s a big and burly man, but everything he touches turns to disaster. “Piss off, Tredgarth,” I said nastily, and he fell back, as I’d known he would. “Did you send them?” I asked Elizabeth again.

She paused, summoning her artillery. “You are a fool, John,” she said eventually. “You behaved disgracefully at Mother’s funeral, and now you’re accusing me of planning your murder. Try not to be so utterly pathetic and ridiculous. I’m quite seriously worried about you. Clearly there’s a strain of lunacy in our family. Georgina has it, and now it seems quite likely you do too. No, I did not send any men to murder you. I sometimes wish I had. Is there any other crime of which you wish to accuse me? No? Good. So kindly get the hell out of my way.”

I got the hell out of her way. And I still didn’t understand what had happened in England, or why, or who had set it all in motion. I only knew that I had a boat waiting at St Helier and an ocean to cross. So, with the questions still unanswered, I found my rented bike and pedalled off to find the world.

At noon the next day a good west wind whipped me through the Passage du Fromveur between Ushant and the French mainland. I should have stood much further out to sea, passing Ushant well beyond the horizon and thus avoiding the heavy merchant traffic that thrashes round Finisterre, but I had a fancy to run the headland’s tides and, as my life was now once more governed by fancy, I stood inshore and let Sunflower have her head.

I had an ebbing spring tide in the passage so that we shot through at close to fifteen knots. The wind was brisk enough to shatter the waves on the rocks about the Kereon light. Seabirds screamed above the islands that were bright with gorse in the sunlight. Another British boat was shooting the passage with me, but, once he had cleared the Pierres Vertes cardinal buoy, he turned due south towards the Raz de Sein while I held west towards the open ocean. At dusk, looking back, I could see the brilliant sweep of Le Cre’ach Lighthouse marking my last sight of land. Lisbon next, I thought, and then I wondered why, and supposed it was because the first time I’d sailed away from Devon I’d made the Tagus my first port of call. I had no need to go there now. Instead, I decided, I would go straight for the Azores. I would sail into Horta and there, at those hospitable quays, meet the first sea-gypsies again. Such gypsies rarely ventured further north than the Azores, and few even went that far towards the cold latitudes, but I knew there would be a handful of weather-beaten boats and I’d hear the first tenuous strands of gossip from the world I’d temporarily deserted. Perhaps I’d find a crew who wanted to cross the Atlantic. Or perhaps I’d change my mind and go south, round Africa, to head up into the paradises of the Indian Ocean. Nothing mattered any more so, at a whim, I decided to skip Lisbon.

Sunflower and I fell into our old routine. I slept mostly by day when other boats might be expected to keep a better watch than at night. I had a new radar reflector at the mast-tip, but I doubted whether any night-time crew on a merchant vessel would be watching their radar; more likely they’d be watching dirty videos and they wouldn’t even feel the bump as they drove Sunflower under. More yachtsmen die crushed under the bows of careless steamers than from their own mistakes, so at night, when the heavens were dazzling with stars, I stayed awake close to the self-steering gear. I’d doze at times. Sunflower was behaving beautifully, her newly cleaned hull making her sweet in the water. We were on a long windward beat, but the weather was good; lulling me to sleep and to reflection.

England already seemed like a bad and unreal dream. Had two men really tried to kill me? I knew they had, but now, where the memory had once made me wake sweating in the night, it seemed merely ridiculous. It had surely all been a mistake. The police had taken no interest in my return, and why should they? The only resentment had been from my family, and from Sir Leon’s staff who felt cheated of their glorious picture. Had they sent the two men? The possibility intrigued me, but a few moments of thought convinced me that the notion of Jennifer Pallavicini ordering my death was a nonsense. She had no motive that I could see. Elizabeth was a more likely candidate, but none of it seemed to matter any more. The whole episode was scoured clean by a northwest wind and the ocean’s long swell.

Charlie was right, I thought. The picture was long gone. It was in some Texan vault, or Japanese mansion, or Swiss strongroom. Whoever had bought it would take care to keep it safe, silent and hidden for generations. Perhaps, hundreds of years in the future, the picture would surface again and the art historians would recall that it had once been stolen from an obscure British family, but for now, for Elizabeth and me, the Van Gogh might just as well be on the dark side of the moon.

Not that I cared any more; I was back at sea, chopping my bows into the long ocean waves. I slept in the mornings. At noon, after the ritual sight, I made myself a meal. In the afternoons I found work to do. The new joinery in the cabin needed varnishing, and, day by day, coat by coat, the gleam deepened. I catnapped in the early evening, ate again, then read until the sun dropped. I had an old battered Shakespeare, Proust, The Oxford Book of English Verse, and Joshua Slocum’s account of his solo voyage round the world. There was meat enough in those four volumes to last a lifetime. All had been soaked when Garrard had dropped Sunflower off the grid, but the pages had dried out and, though crinkled, were still readable. When the light made the pages indistinguishable I would prepare the sextant for the first star sight of the evening, then just sit and let the time drift past.

At night the phosphorescence glittered in our wake. Sometimes a large fish would come close to the hull and I’d see its rising track like a trailing coat of stars deep in the water. In seven years I’d never tired of that sight, nor thought I ever would. It became warmer as we travelled south. By day I rarely wore any clothes: why wear out things that cost money to replace? At night I pulled on jeans and a sweater and, in the early hours when sleep threatened most, I would go to the foredeck and exercise till I was sweating. There isn’t much exercise to be had on a yacht; the toughest task is hoisting the mainsail, but, in a good year, it stayed up most of the time.

I took the sails down once. I was fourteen nights from Ushant and the weather turned. The dawn revealed a sullen oily swell above which my sails hung limp beneath a brassy sky. The glass dropped all morning, while heavy greasy clouds piled from the west to shroud the sky in an ominous darkness. At noon a heavy rain flayed the sea, then stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The rudder banged in its pintles.

I sensed a squall. There was none in sight, but the instinct is enough. At sea it’s best to act on the first impulse, for there might not be time for second thoughts. I dropped the foresails and lashed them to the pulpit rails, then let down the main. I tied the heavy sail to its boom, then disconnected the self-steering gear. I slid the washboards into their grooves, bolted them home, and locked the companionway shut.

A minute later the squall struck. It came out of the west like an express train. The squall was an onslaught of wind and rain, stirred to fury, but so confined and travelling so fast that it had neither the time nor space to stir the sea’s venom into threatening waves. The rain seemed to be flying parallel to the sea which was being whip-skimmed into a fine spray that struck Sunflower with the force of a sand-blaster. I crouched down from its fury and felt my naked back being stung red by the rain’s lash. I could hear nothing but a maniacal hiss. I looked up once and saw the mast straining. The forestays were bar taut while the twin backstays were bellying out like bows. I dared not look again. The pressure of the wind on the bare pole was driving Sunflower backwards and I could feel the sea’s pressure trying to slew the tiller. I had never known such fury in an Atlantic squall. I’d experienced them in the Pacific, but this was a timely reminder never to take the sea lightly. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the squall went.

The wind dropped to nothing. A gentle heavy rain pattered down. Behind me I could see the sea being scourged white, but ahead and around Sunflower the water was just a dappled black. The hull seemed to shiver as the cockpit drains gurgled.

Two other squalls struck, neither as fierce as the first, and an hour after the second the black clouds rent to show sunlight. By nightfall we were under full sail again, beating west and south as though there had been no interruption. I played myself tunes on my penny-whistle and opened a rare bottle of wine. Two dolphins investigated me, and stayed with the boat halfway through the night.

Next morning the first dawn rays of sun reflected pink on the undersides of the wings of two gulls. It was a sign that I was nearing the Azores and by dusk I could see the white clouds heaping above the mountains of Graciosa. Twelve hours later, after a sweet night’s sail, Sunflower was safe alongside the painted wall in Horta. I recognised two yachts in the busy harbour. One, a graceful double-ender, belonged to an hospitable American couple whom I had last met in Tasmania, while the other, an immaculately maintained wooden yawl, was sailed by an obnoxious Swede who was the bane of every sailor on the seven seas. I asked in the Café Sport where the Americans were. “They had family trouble, Johnny, so they flew home.”

“That’s a mistake,” I said fervently.

My own mistake was to go to the Café Sport. I was just addressing a dirty postcard to Charlie when Ulf, the loathsome Swede, slapped my back. “I saw Sunflower here. That’s Johnny, I said to myself. How are you?”

Because I was back where I belonged and therefore feeling well-disposed to all mankind, even to the gruesome Ulf, I said I was in wonderful health, which rather disappointed him. I asked how he was.

“A redundant question, Johnny, as you well know. I do not get the illness, ever. Physical sickness is an aberration of the subconscious mind.” He was off, unstoppable and unbearable. I’d once heard an Australian threaten to break Ulf’s bloody legs to test his theories that all ailments were in the mind, but the trouble is that the repugnant Ulf stands nearly six feet eight inches tall and is built like an advert for steroids.

He drank lemonade while I drank beer. Once he had expounded his theory of human sickness he launched himself on Sunflower’s ills. “You have a new mast, yes?”

“Is that what it is, Ulf? I was trying to work out what that big stick was.”

“I remember telling you to get a new mast. You were wise to take my advice, Johnny. But it should have been a wooden mast. Wooden masts are more easily repaired. Your shrouds are still too far forward.”

“They’re not.”

“I know about these things. If you don’t want to move the chain-plates I should take three feet off the mast. That will cure the weather-helm.”

“Balls. She doesn’t have weather-helm.” Well, a touch, I confessed to myself, but nothing to worry about. “Balls,” I said again.

He smiled. Ulf always smiles when he’s insulted, and he’s insulted often because he always knows what is wrong with everyone’s boat and, quite unasked, offers his tedious advice. “I shall come and look her over for you, Johnny.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“I will make no charge. My only concern is your safety.”

I ordered another beer. I was trying to think of some outrageous fault which I could assign to Ulf’s yawl, but my imagination wasn’t up to the task. The big bastard kept an exemplary boat.

“Someone was asking about you last week,” Ulf said suddenly.

“Who?”

“I don’t know. I just mentioned it.”

“A man? A woman? A Swede?”

Ulf missed the feeble joke. He has no sense of humour, just a skin as thick as a shark’s hide. “Just a man,” he said airily. “A Portuguese man, I think. He wore a suit. He wasn’t local, or at least I haven’t seen him since last week.”

I didn’t like that the man wore a suit. To my mind that made him a suspicious character, but at least it hadn’t been an Englishman which meant that it could not have been Garrard. “Did this man say why he wanted me?”

“No.”

“You’re a fat lot of help, Ulf.”

“I try to be.” He offered me his benevolent smile. “That is my purpose in life. To help people. But the man did say one thing that I found most notable.”

“What?”

“That you are an earl of England. A real aristocrat.”

I spluttered laughter into my beer. “Oh, come off it, Ulf! For Christ’s sake! How long have you known me?”

“We first met, I remember, in the Marquesas, so it has been just over three years.”

“Do you really think an earl would be a bare-arsed sailor?”

“It surprised me, I confess.”

“It isn’t true. So don’t tell people it is. My father bred laboratory rats and my mother was a marriage guidance counsellor before she did a bunk with one of her clients.”

He was sceptical. “If you say so, Johnny.”

“I do say so.”

“Then I must believe you.” He sipped his lemonade. “And if this mistaken man returns, what do I tell him?”

“To take a flying fuck at the moon, of course.”

“It has often occurred to me,” he said blandly, “that in Sweden we do not have such an offensive language as in England.”

Poor bloody Sweden, I thought. “You haven’t seen me, Ulf.” I laid it on the line for him. “You understand that? I don’t exist. I’ve vanished.”

“I understand, Johnny. Trust me.”

I didn’t care who searched for me. I just wanted to be left alone.

Or almost alone. I lingered a few days in Horta, trying to sense a pattern in the Atlantic weather and hoping that some girl would offer herself as Sunflower’s crew. The delay also gave Ulf a chance to inflict himself on Sunflower. He told me that her cockpit drains were inadequate, her bow fairleads misplaced, and that her self-steering lacked robustness. He told me to replace the aluminium whisker-poles with carbon fibre rods and when I asked him how the hell I was supposed to find carbon fibre rods on some remote islands in the middle of the bloody Atlantic he told me to buy sailboard masts. It was actually a good idea. That’s the trouble with Ulf; he’s usually right, but contrariness makes most people do the very opposite of whatever he advises. He advised me to give up smoking, so I puffed pipe smoke at him till he left.

That evening I met a Dutch girl who was almost persuaded to jump her friends’ yacht to cross the Atlantic with me, but next morning she thought twice about it before disappearing northwards to mother and safety. I began to think about leaving myself. It wasn’t really the season for a southern run across the Atlantic, and the weather charts were not helpful, so I decided I should sail south, far south. I remembered how Joshua Slocum had set out to sail round the world from west to east, but, chased by pirates off the African shore, had abruptly decided to go east to west instead. If such whimsical decisions were good enough for Joshua and Spray then they were good enough for Johnny and Sunflower, so I dragged out the charts of the southern oceans. There was a river on the coast of Africa where I’d once made some friends and where I knew I could find provisions. Sunflower, despite Ulf’s gloomy prognostications, was in fine fettle and ready to go.

So, next morning, I bought wine, cheese, fresh fruit and vegetables. I had decided to leave at nightfall. I finished provisioning at midday, sent Georgina and Sister Felicity a postcard, then went down to the cabin to sleep. It was hot and the smell of varnish still lingered in the close air. It was made worse by the odour of powdered boric acid which I’d scattered in the bilges as a lethal present to the Azorean cockroaches. I wore nothing but a faded pair of denim shorts, but I was still sweating. I’d closed the companionway to make a sleep-inducing darkness, but instead of sleeping I lay fretfully awake. I listened to the lap of water on the steel hull and tried to let it lull me into drowsing.

I had just succeeded in dropping into a half-doze when someone stepped from the quay ladder on to Sunflower’s deck. I swore at the interruption. With any luck it was only someone mooring their boat alongside, but then I heard the footsteps climb down into the cockpit followed by a tentative knock on the closed washboards. “If that’s you, Ulf,” I shouted, “get lost.”

“Mr Rossendale?” It was a woman’s voice.

I slid off the bunk and shot back the companionway. The sudden brightness of the afternoon sun made me blink at my visitor. I was so astonished that at first I thought I was sleeping and this was some dream apparition. “Good God in his merciful heaven,” I said in greeting.

“Good afternoon,” said Jennifer Pallavicini.

“Hello.” I didn’t know what else to say. Nor, evidently, did she because her customary certitude had deserted her. She was desperately ill at ease, perhaps because, instead of being in an air-conditioned art gallery, she was on a tiny island in a scruffy yacht with a man she had recently accused of being a thief. She looked cool enough, despite the wretched heat, in a loose white blouse and a pair of bleached designer jeans, but there was a timidity in her eyes that seemed unnatural to this chillingly capable girl. I rested my forearms on the washboards. “I’ve been wondering,” I said irrelevantly, “how come an English girl has a name like Pallavicini?”

“My father was Italian, of course. My mother’s English.”

“ ‘Was’?” I asked.

“My father died ten years ago.”

She said it almost defiantly, as if challenging me to find the right response. I grunted some dutiful regret, then slid the washboards out of place and dumped them on the chart table’s chair. “I can offer you tea,” I said hospitably, “rotgut Azorean wine, Irish whiskey, beer, orange juice, or instant coffee.”

“I haven’t come to be sociable, Mr Rossendale.” That was said with a touch of her old asperity.

“Then stay thirsty, damn you.” I poured myself a mug of the rotgut wine, took it and the bottle to the cockpit and sat down. Jennifer Pallavicini remained standing. “Sir Leon sent me,” she said, as though it entirely explained her presence.

“I thought you’d come because you found me irresistible. Or was it to apologise?” I saw the flash of angered pride on her face. “Oh, for God’s sake, girl, sit down and have a drink. I won’t poison you.”

“Tea,” she said as she sat. “Please.”

Neither of us spoke as I made the tea. This was evidently not to be a very jolly meeting. I remembered she drank her tea without either sugar or milk, so I served it black with a slice of lemon. She thanked me. I asked her how she had known where I was.

“Sir Leon alerted all the ports where you might be found. We had a man here some days ago, and he arranged with a Swedish yachtsman to tell us if you arrived.”

Ulf, I thought, the smug, treacherous, bloody bastard. I hoped his precious yawl sank. I didn’t say as much. Instead, because of the searing heat, I rigged the awning over the boom to shade the cockpit. If Jennifer Pallavicini was grateful for my solicitousness, she didn’t thank me.

I sat down and sipped my warm wine. “Presumably Sir Leon is making one last desperate appeal to me?” She did not reply and I shook my head. “I didn’t steal the bloody thing. I had nothing whatever to do with it.”

She ignored my denial. Instead, and in a very fervent voice, she asked whether I had liked the Van Gogh.

Her question, and the sincere tone in which it was asked, took me by surprise. “Yes, I did like it. Very much.” I smiled. “It was like a splinter of sunlight hanging on the wall.”

“He was good at colour,” she said dispassionately, “perhaps the best of them all.”

“I used to go to my mother’s room to look at it,” I went on. “She didn’t approve of my doing that, but she didn’t approve of much that I did. In the end she kept the East wing locked to stop what she called my trespassing.”

“But you could pick the locks?”

“Indeed I could, Miss Pallavicini, and I frequently did. Does that make me a thief?”

She did not answer. I suddenly wondered whether she really was ‘Miss’ Pallavicini. She wore no rings.

She saw my glance at her hands, and seemed amused by it. In turn she examined me. I was sweaty, scarred, suntanned and filthy. I supposed she was a girl who liked her men ponced up with armpit anti-fouling and eau-de-Cologne, which rather spoilt any chance I might have with her. Sitting there I realised that I really did rather want a chance with her, but that could have been mere disappointment at being turned down by the Dutch girl.

“We checked your story about the boat’s name,” Jennifer said suddenly. “You were telling the truth.”

“Thank you, your honour.” I mocked her by tugging at a sunbleached forelock.

She stared quizzically at me. “How do you make a living?”

“With these.” I held up my hands. “In a month or two I’ll be in waters where there are no boatyards, no chandleries, no sail-lofts, but enough broken yachts to need a slew of skills. I’ll mend engines, tension rigging and rebuild hulls. If I can’t mend it, then it’s probably broken for life.”

“And those activities support you?” She sounded incredulous.

“I’ve a little money. I had an Uncle Thomas who shared my views about the rest of the family, so he left me a legacy.” I poured myself another mug of the wine. It was rotgut, but I was used to rotgut. “What is this, Miss Pallavicini? A cross-examination?”

She stared at me as though she might find a truth hidden behind my eyes. “I wish I knew whether you did steal the painting,” she said after a while.

“I didn’t. Cross my heart and hope to die, but I didn’t.”

She paused, as if waiting to see whether I would be struck dead as a result of my childish words. I stayed alive. “If you didn’t steal it,” she asked, “why would those two men think you might know where to find it?”

“Because they’ve got their wires crossed.” I paused. “I thought that perhaps you or Sir Leon might have sent them.”

“That’s ridiculous!” She was genuinely astonished at the accusation. “They attacked me too!”

“A set-up?” I suggested, but not too forcefully, “to make me think you didn’t know them?”

“You’re an idiot,” she said in utter scorn, but not in her usual hostile manner.

I shrugged, but said nothing. A gull swooped down to Sunflower’s stern, hovered for a second, then glided away. A fishing boat, high prowed and brightly painted, belched its engine into life to gust a cloud of filthy smoke over the harbour.

“We need your help, Mr Rossendale,” Jennifer Pallavicini said when the silence between us had stretched too long.

“I’m sailing south,” I said. “I provisioned today, I’ve done my chart work, and I’m going south. I’ll probably call in at Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, because a lot of girls hang about the yacht dock there looking for a lift to nowhere, and after that I’m sailing south to an African river I visited two years ago. The villagers there don’t see yachtsmen from one year’s end to the next and they’re as friendly as hell. The approach to the place is a bit bloody, one rusted buoy ten miles off shore and shoals that shift around like a snake in a sleeping bag, but…”

“Please,” Jennifer Pallavicini interrupted me.

“I rebuilt their generator when I was last there” – I ignored her appeal – “and I promised I’d go back to make sure it was still working.”

Jennifer Pallavicini said nothing. I was as tempted as hell to say I’d help her, but only because she was such a beautiful girl. I applied sound feminist principles and made my decision as if she was as ugly as a baboon’s behind. “The answer’s no,” I said. “I offered you my help last month, and you turned it down.”

She opened her handbag and took out an envelope. I thought for a second that she was going to offer me Sir Leon Buzzacott’s autograph on a cheque, but instead she took a photograph from the envelope. She held it out to me.

The photograph showed a pale yellow triangle on a white background. Next to the yellow triangle was a black-and-white measuring stick which told me that each side of the triangle was three inches long. “I’m not really an expert on modern art,” I said, “but if I were you I wouldn’t buy it.”

She ignored my feeble sarcasm. “It’s a corner of a painted canvas,” Jennifer Pallavicini said pedantically, “and our tests confirm that it was almost certainly cut from the Stowey Sunflowers. A letter came with it, Mr Rossendale, demanding four million pounds for the rest of the painting. The letter was posted two weeks ago. The letter stated that if we don’t pay the ransom by the end of August, then the painting will be burned and we will be sent the ashes.”

“Then pay the four million,” I said casually. “It seems a fair enough price for a twenty-million-quid painting.”

“Pay four million pounds to a blackmailer? To a man who will only demand more? Who, once we pay the first monies, will cut a sunflower from the canvas and demand another four million?” She was suddenly and vehemently passionate. “For God’s sake, Mr Rossendale, don’t you understand? The thieves will mutilate it to make their money! They’re barbarians, and they have to be stopped!”

“Hang on,” I said. “A month ago you thought I was the thief. Now you’ve selected a group of barbarians.”

“Maybe it’s whoever you sold the painting to,” she said angrily.

I shrugged and shook my head. “Not guilty.”

“Or maybe it’s you,” she said. “Maybe you think we’ll ransom the painting, then buy it from you.”

“Give me a cheque for twenty-four million,” I said flippantly, “and the painting’s yours.”

“Damn you,” she said angrily, then pushed the photograph back into her handbag.

Behind me a French sloop was ghosting into the harbour. I turned to watch as it dropped its sails and a girl in a bikini went forward to pick up a mooring. Ulf was doing strenuous calisthenics on his foredeck and I saw him straighten up to eye the deficiencies of the newcomer’s boat. There wasn’t much wrong with the girl, not that I could see. I looked back to Jennifer Pallavicini and decided she too would look very good in a bikini. “Why do you need me?” I asked her. “You must have hired ransom experts? Have you told the police?”

“Of course we have. The officer who was in charge of the original theft has been assigned to us.”

“Not Harry Abbott!”

“Detective Inspector Abbott,” she corrected me. “Yes.”

“Bloody hell!” I said in disgust. Harry Abbott is someone who lives under a stone along with all the other nasty things that crawl and creep on slimy bellies in the Stygian dark. He had been the policeman who had tried to pin the theft of the Van Gogh on to me in the first place. He had failed then, but I didn’t fancy him trying again. “What does the bastard say you should do?”

“Persuade you to come home.”

“I wouldn’t go to Paradise on Harry’s recommendation.”

“Which doesn’t alter the fact that you should be doing everything in your power to assist us. You are, after all, the legal owner of the painting.”

“A minute ago,” I pointed out, “you accused me of being the blackmailer.”

“It’s Inspector Abbott’s belief” – her voice made it clear that she did not entirely share his certainty – “that the blackmailers waited till you sailed away before they made an approach to Sir Leon.”

“Why would they do that?”

She shrugged to show that she had no answer. “What I do know,” she said, “is that we need your authorisation for any attempts we may make to recover it. Otherwise Sir Leon could be accused of accepting stolen goods, so we need your permission to negotiate.”

That seemed fair enough. “Does that mean,” I asked her, “that if Sir Leon retrieves it, he’ll have to give it back to me?”

“Of course,” she said defiantly, as though, under those circumstances, she would dare me to take possession.

I smiled at her. “I wouldn’t want it. Where could I hang it? There might be room on the lavatory bulkhead, but it would probably get in the way of the wet locker.”

That small joke went down like a cement balloon. I sighed, went below to the cabin, and tore a page out of a notebook. I found a pencil and scribbled a quick message. ‘Sir Leon Buzzacott and his wage-slaves have my full authority to do whatever they think necessary for the safe recovery of one painting by Vincent Van Gogh, commonly known as the Stowey Sunflowers. This authorisation is signed by John Rossendale, Lord Stowey, Earl of Stowey, and Master under God of the good ship Sunflower.’ I dated it, then embellished it with an ornate rubber stamp that has Sunflower’s name, a quasi-Royal crown, and some nonsense numbers. I use the stamp to impress immigration officials in self-important but trivial countries. It doesn’t reduce the bureaucracy, or the scale of the necessary bribes, but it sometimes makes them a trifle more respectful.

“There you go.” I handed the note to Jennifer Pallavicini. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? Pity you flew all the way here to fetch it. You could have asked me nicely and I’d have posted it to you. Still, it’s very good to see you. Would you like an early dinner before I sail? I do a very good Corned Boeuf à la Bourguignonne. I’ve even got some fresh vegetables.”

She ignored my babbling. Instead she tore my note into shreds which, in defiance of Greenpeace’s valiant endeavours, she scattered into the harbour water. “We need your personal help, my lord.”

I leaned back on the thwart. “I’m always suspicious when you call me ‘my lord’. What do you plan to do if I return to England? Torture a confession out of me?”

“If you agree to help us,” she said, “we shall naturally assume your innocence.”

I feigned grateful astonishment. “Oh, my God! You’re so kind!”

She had the grace to blush, but continued pressing her case. “We need your knowledge. You can remember what happened four years ago. You know more than I do about those two wretched men. Someone fears what you know, but if you’re lost in the oceans, then they won’t show themselves again. So please come back, my lord, and help us.”

She had asked very nicely, and she was so very pretty, so I very nearly agreed, but every time I went home I regretted it. I’d been back at sea just long enough to get the taste again, and I was dreaming of those palm-edged rivers and impossibly blue lagoons. “You have my verbal authority,” I said wearily, “to do whatever you want, so go and do it. But leave me alone.”

She nodded, almost as if she had expected the refusal. “I have some other news for you.”

I waved a negligent hand as if to suggest that I did not much care whether she revealed the news or not.

“Your sister, Lady Elizabeth Tredgarth, is initiating proceedings to take your younger sister back to England.”

She had spoken in a very matter-of-fact voice, a poker-player’s voice. She had also appalled me, as she had doubtless hoped to do. “She’s doing what?” I could not keep the anger from my voice.

Jennifer Pallavicini shrugged, as if to suggest that none of this was of much importance to her. “It seems there’s a nun who is particularly fond of the Lady Georgina?”

“Sister Felicity, yes.”

“The Lady Elizabeth feels that Sister Felicity is too old and too sick to look after Lady Georgina any longer. There’s also a possibility that the convent hospital might be sold, so Lady Elizabeth wants her younger sister brought home.”

“Home?”

“To where she lives, of course. In Gloucestershire, isn’t it?”

I stared in horror at Jennifer Pallavicini. “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Elizabeth can’t stand the sight of Georgina!”

Jennifer Pallavicini didn’t reply.

“How the hell do you know all this?” I demanded angrily.

“Because we take a great deal of interest in your family,” she said equably. “It’s a family that might bring our gallery a great treasure.”

“You’re making this up,” I said. “You’re telling me this nonsense in the hope that it will bring me back to England!”

“Your sister didn’t want you to know,” she said. “Indeed, she didn’t institute proceedings until she’d heard you had sailed away. Of course, you don’t have to believe me, but I thought perhaps the news might be of some slight interest to you.”

The trouble was that I did believe her. Why else had Elizabeth been at the convent? “But we paid for Georgina,” I protested, “for her lifetime!”

“A large sum of money was put into trust for your younger sister’s care,” Jennifer Pallavicini said pedantically, “but our legal informant tells us that the trustees retain the right to dictate how that money should be spent. If the Lady Elizabeth is confident that she can care for her sister, then there is no reason why the trust fund should not also be given into her care.”

And how that made sense, brilliant clear lucid sense. Elizabeth, married to her impoverished and useless husband, would get her claws into Georgina’s money, while Georgina could be stuck into a cottage on the Tredgarth farm with some harridan to guard her.

“The matter hasn’t been decided yet,” Jennifer Pallavicini went on. “The trustees need to be convinced that the Lady Elizabeth can provide a proper home for your younger sister, but there seems little doubt that she will succeed in so convincing them.”

“Damn you,” I said to Jennifer Pallavicini. “Damn you, damn you, damn you.” The ties of duty, unavoidable duty, were wrapping about me. I could desert Stowey, I could watch my mother die and not shed a tear because of it, but Georgina was different. The only people who had ever been able to pierce that tremulous insanity had been Nanny, myself and Charlie. Now she needed me.

“Sir Leon” – Jennifer Pallavicini could not resist a small smile as she played her ace – “is willing to guarantee a secure future for the Lady Georgina whether the painting is retrieved or not.”

I said nothing. I was remembering the spitefulness with which Elizabeth had treated Georgina as a child. It wasn’t a deliberate spitefulness, merely a reflection of Elizabeth’s impatience. But, deliberate or not, it was unthinkable that Georgina should be put into Elizabeth’s care.

Jennifer Pallavicini watched me, then opened her handbag and took out an air ticket which she laid on the thwart beside me. “If you go to your family’s solicitors, my lord, you can doubtless stop this nonsense instantly.”

I picked up the ticket. It was for a first-class seat, Azores to Lisbon and Lisbon to London. “When it comes to my family,” I said haughtily to Jennifer Pallavicini, “I don’t need your damned help.” I tore the ticket into shreds, then scattered the scraps into the water. “Goodbye, Miss Pallavicini.”

I had angered her, but I had also succeeded in surprising her. She took a few seconds to recover, then tried to turn the screw on my guilt. “It will be no good writing to your solicitors, my lord. Your objections to the Lady Georgina’s fate won’t be taken seriously unless you’re in England to take some personal responsibility for her.”

“I said I don’t need your help to look after my family, Miss Pallavicini. So, goodbye.”

“You’re not going to help your younger sister?” she asked incredulously.

I smiled at her. “I’m going to sail away, Jennifer.” I suddenly clicked my fingers as though I had been struck with a brilliant and timely idea. “Would you like to sail with me? You can cook, can’t you?”

She stood up. “I cannot believe,” she said with a frigid dignity, “that you could be so careless of your younger sister’s future.” She paused, evidently seeking some final and crushing farewell. “You are undoubtedly the most selfish and unfeeling man I have ever met.”

“And you’re cluttering up my boat. So if you don’t want to come with me, go away.”

She went away.

An hour later, as I was taking off the mainsail cover, I saw her being ferried out to Ulf’s yawl. I assumed she was going to pay her informant his reward, so I wrestled my fibreglass dinghy over the guardrails, took the outboard from the stern locker, and motored over to join the happy party. I ignored Miss Pallavicini, instead I killed the small engine, drifted alongside the yawl, and told Ulf that he was a slime-bag.

“Johnny, how nice to see you! You know Miss Pallavicini, I think? You would like a drink with us?”

“I wouldn’t drink your bloody prune juice if I was dying of constipation.” I climbed out of the dinghy, hitched it to one of his shrouds, and walked down his scuppers. “I told you to keep your Swedish mouth shut.”

Jennifer Pallavicini’s eyes were wide with alarm. She clutched her handbag to her belly, but otherwise seemed unable to move. She doubtless believed that the huge Swede was about to pulverise me, and doubtless, in principle, she approved of that pulverisation, but it’s one thing to want someone beaten up and quite another to see real blood on the deck. I also believed that Ulf would pulverise me, but I was fed up with the bastard and wanted to hit him.

“It was only a business arrangement,” Ulf said smugly.

“And this is your profit.” I jumped into his scrubbed cockpit and punched him in the belly. He gasped, but did not hit back, so I smacked him hard across the mouth. The blow jarred his head and brought a fleck of blood to his lips.

He still wouldn’t fight. “Johnny!” He wiped his mouth. “This is not like you.”

“That’s because you don’t know me. So listen. If you ever open your mouth about me again, anywhere, to anyone, I’ll find your rotten carcass and I’ll feed it to the bloody fish. Do you understand me?”

He had backed away. Jennifer Pallavicini’s face showed utter horror. She made a small noise of protest, but I ignored her. Ulf waved a placatory hand. “I was only trying to help you, Johnny. Maybe it was important to you, yes?”

“Maybe it wasn’t your business, you Swedish bastard.” His reward money, in Portuguese escudos, was strewn across the cockpit grating.

“It was just business, Johnny, just business.” He sounded miserable, while I was mildly astonished to discover that he had a streak of jelly instead of a backbone. I’d expected one hell of a fight from him, but he was plainly scared. Nor was there any point in hitting him again, because he wasn’t going to fight back. “You’re a creep, Ulf. You’re a real pain in the arse.”

He nodded eager agreement with my judgment. “But you are a real English earl, Johnny, yes?” He had backed to stand beside the mizzen mast at the far end of his cockpit, from where he nodded towards Jennifer Pallavicini to prove the source of his information.

“And you’re queen of the bloody fairies, Ulf. Piss off.”

I had hardly acknowledged Jennifer Pallavicini’s presence though, if I was honest with myself, I knew I’d been showing off to her. These days women might claim that they prefer enlightened men who can change nappies, do the ironing, and whip up tasty little soufflés, but in truth I suspect they prefer men who can beat the shit out of loathsome Swedes.

I motored back to Sunflower. The confrontation had made me feel much better, which was some consolation. Two hours later I cast off, hoisted my sails, and did what I had promised to Jennifer Pallavicini.

I sailed away.